Mass spectrometry is a technology which is widely used in most scientific disciplines that require accurate and precise measurement of elemental and molecular components. Its use in the pharmaceutical sector is often associated with the Drug Discovery and Development process. The primordial step to analyze a sample is to perform a sample treatment to enable its study. It really requires know-how to obtain good quality results. The following tips and tricks can help you to rapidly select a protein purification strategy and to anticipate some possible problems.

mRNA vaccines are developing very quickly. There are already 25 ongoing clinical trials against cancers, as well as clinical trials against infectious diseases such as HIV. Recombinant monoclonal antibody (mAB) based treatments that have lead to the most successful therapies could even switch to mRNA coding heavy and light chains for direct antibody production into the patient (as of yet still at the level of mouse models).

Indeed, messenger RNAs (mRNA) are now new biological entities to take in consideration for the development of efficient and personalized therapies. They have several advantages over conventional drugs:

Gene reporter assays are widely used in research and Drug Discovery. The development of such cell lines is often time-consuming and costly, sometimes upwards of 5-20k € per cell line. And once these cell lines are finally validated, why jeopardize your results with cheap and low-end detection kits? They could impact the reproducibility of your experiments in unintended and unanticipated ways. BPS Bioscience has developed two reliable and extremely powerful luciferase detection kits: the ONE-Step™ Luciferase Assay System (#60690) and the Dual Luciferase Assay System (#60683).

Challenges and limitations of ADC development

One of the major challenges of modern medicine is to find a safe cancer therapy. The Food and Drug Administration has approved Adcetris® (brentuximab vedotin) and Kadcyla® (ado-trastuzumab emtansine) that are considered as powerful treatments against cancer. They are good examples of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). The principle is to link a drug, that can be cytotoxic, to an antibody able to target cancer cells. Unfortunately, the development of ADCs faces some difficulties. Indeed, depending on the method for the conjugation, the ADC can be highly heterogenous.